Should You Care About Customer Experience?

Bold question, as nowadays, everybody talks about customer experience. You cannot go to a business conference without hearing about it, and you cannot browse a blog without at least one article on the subject. Maybe there is even a Customer Experience Manager in your team. However, is it REALLY that important? What is the real impact of CX on a big corporation and can it be measured?

We at Pattern have been involved in several customer experience projects over our 40 years’ worth of combined experience within industries like telecommunications and financial services. We would like to share with you our unique insights and show you what strategies work and generate real results. For good measure, we’ve also thrown in a couple of DON’Ts to help spare you and your teams the pain of discovering those by trial and error.

At Pattern, we love numbers, so let’s start with some statistics.

According to Gartner’s study on the subject: Customer Experience in Marketing, 81% of companies think there will be competition in the next 2 years on the market based on CX.

48% of them have already identified a connection between CX and their business goals.

47% of them have already used customer journey mapping successfully to fully understand their customer’s needs.

41% of them experienced higher results from CX optimization than they ever expected.

However, only 22% of them actually exceeded their customer’s expectations of CX, and let’s face it: this is not a big number.

What doesn’t work in the process of improving CX?

During my 10 years in multinational businesses, I had the chance to experience a lot of good, but also some poor practices in CX optimization. I would like to start with the strategies that do NOT work, so we can later concentrate only on the effective ones.

1.Having a separate team of CX specialists

Nobody likes outsiders trying to control their work. Team members can feel undermined and it can feel unfair that experts from different teams without responsibility are trying to influence their hard work. This model is not going to work for you in the long run.

2. Trying to define CX goals without involving commercial metrics

Executives need to be persuaded that CX efforts won’t be without real results for the business. You can’t expect them to care about CX, because it’s a trendy topic nowadays. CX has to toughen up and contribute to the success of your business just like any other KPI. You have to connect CX with KPI’s, like conversion, customer retention or customer satisfaction. Figure out your metrics and make sure your CX efforts can be measured with real numbers in relation to revenue.

3. Measuring CX differently on your various channels

If you would like to map out your omnichannel usage and identify your underperforming channels, you have to measure your CX at every channel with the same methodology, with the same frequency to have reliable results.

4. Trying to make a ”Channel Competition”

Yes, you have to measure every channel with the same methodology; however, this does not mean that you have to compare digital and retail channels and rule out one or another channel from your distribution strategy. On the contrary! It is crystal clear that your channels with human support will always be more effective than your self-care digital channels. After all, your digital channels cannot fix everything with a nice ”We are sorry, Madam”. The goal here is not to find a winner; it is to develop and optimize every channel at their own pace based on feedback from customers.

5. Closed mindset

Almost every big corporation we have worked with stated that they would like to implement an omnichannel mindset into their corporation. In practice, this is not always the case. In every team, their own channels are the priority and often they do not have the time or motivation to find synergies between their channels and other channels. A good solution could be to provide cross-channel targets and KPI’s to channel leaders and make business development a common goal across the organization. Oddly, this never happens, in spite of the constant talking about the importance of omnichannel mindset. We don’t really understand why.

6. Preaching water, drinking wine

I was working at big corporations where they always included parts about the improvements of CX in their presentations to stakeholders; however, in reality, they only measured the growth of EBITDA margins. However, this metric will not help you to measure CX in the business, as CX requires long term investments from the business side.

So, we listed you all these practices that won’t contribute to improving your CX. You can reasonably ask, why do you still need it if it’s this hard?

Because it will benefit you in the long run!

Very few corporations will take effort and resources to improve their customer experience. First of all, it’s a long term project for the company. It takes months to see results and most companies are not willing to wait that long. Moreover, you have to make people from different teams work together and this can be a hard task to do. You have to convince people to break their old habits and change their day-to-day lives.

More importantly, you have to craft a strategy and connect measurable goals and KPI’s to it. This will make the process easier, as you will be able to track your progress.

But, here is the good part: your improved customer experience will be your best unique selling point for your company. Competitors can copy everything from your products to your marketing strategy; however, they cannot copy your customers’ unique experience with your brand. It’s almost like shaping the personality of your brand. Make it unique and stand out from the crowd. Your customers will be thankful.

I’ve always liked history and interesting conversations. This was enough to make “history teacher” feature prominently on my list of dream jobs up until 10th grade. It never happened, but teaching remained as something I always wanted to try.

If I was allowed to give you only one piece of advice on digital transformation, it would be the following: invest an extra minute at the design phase, and save hours on the implementation. The following lines will explain “what to do in that 1 minute”.

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